he cursed as he glared at the disappearing ferry lights and wished he could control what was happening to him. He was thirty years old now—a mature and sophisticated man! Yet he felt as fired up as that lusty twenty-two-year old had felt the night he first laid eyes on her.
Which said—what to him?
‘Ouch,’ Louisa choked as she caught the open toe of her sandal on an unseen stone and almost tripped up.
What other idiot would decide on impulse to go for a walk in the middle of the night? she railed at herself as she lifted up her foot to rub the bruised end of her big toe.
And how far had she come from the hotel since she started out on this crazy venture? With only a slithery moon hanging low in the sky, it was difficult to tell. When all of that hot, senseless restlessness had sent her creeping out of bed and eventually out of the hotel, she’d only intended to take a brisk walk down the beach. How she had ended up going as far as to strike out on one of the many narrow pathways scoured into the hillside by hundreds of years of grazing goats she had no idea.
Yes, she did, she then argued with herself. She’d decided that if she couldn’t sleep she might as well watch the sun come up. She’d intended to walk as far as a plateau of rock she had used to like to sit on to watch the sky slowly turn from navy blue to rich vermilion to a soft azure blue.
Her teeth buried themselves in her bottom lip when it suddenly occurred to her that it wasn’t even coming light yet. Could she have got her timing all wrong? Putting her foot back on the ground, she squinted at her watch but it was too dark to read the tiny silver face.
A sigh shook her. She really should turn back.
But she didn’t want to turn back.
She did not want to be alone in that hotel bedroom tormenting herself with things she had no right to feel any more! Being out here was different because while she was using up energy she wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t scared for her safety—not on this tiny island where the people were more honest and upright and true than a monastery of monks!
But standing on a rough-hewn hillside while it was still dark was beginning to feel just a bit spooky. If anyone happened to catch her skulking around they were going to think that she was a bit spooky too.
A soft giggle broke from her. It was crazy to do it but she suddenly saw the humour of it, the total juvenile silliness of being out here at all!
Then something warm touched her shoulder and she let out an ear-piercing shriek. It was a bat—a bat! she told herself, spinning around to check out that theory, only to have the breath fly from her body when she found she was staring at the tall, dark figure of a man dressed in ghostly grey.
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE of her hands shot up to press against her chest where her heart was hammering. ‘Andreas!’ she gasped out. ‘You scared the life out of me!’ ‘My apologies,’ he said.
He was standing barely two feet away from her but how he’d managed to get that close without her hearing him was enough to send cold shivers chasing up and down Louisa’s spine.
‘What are you doing out here?’ he demanded. ‘Are you out of your mind, Louisa, to be walking about on your own at three-thirty in the morning?'
Three-thirty? ‘I thought it was four-thirty,’ she mumbled, dragging her hand away from her pounding chest to take another look at her watch. She still couldn’t read the tiny silver face but a sinking feeling inside was telling her she must have reset it to the wrong time as she’d flown in to Athens yesterday.
‘Does an hour make a difference? It is still dark out here!'
‘It does to the dawn,’ she murmured faintly. ‘I wanted to watch the sun come up.'
The way he pulled in a deep breath told her he did not think that an adequate excuse. But she’d always loved to watch the sun rise and set in Greece; surely he must remember that?
‘So what’s your reason for being out here?’ Looking up, she all but threw the question at him. Then another thought hit her. ‘You haven’t been following me, have you?'
‘Oh, yes,’ he ground out. ‘I spent the night camped outside your window, waiting for the moment you would decide to do something as stupid as this.'
His sarcasm hit the spot it was meant to. Stuffing her hands into the baggy pockets of her white cotton trousers, Louisa snapped her lips together and glared down at her sandaled feet. The raw tension flitting between them was suffocating, the rumbling tumble of emotions put there because of that totally uncalled for, totally unwarranted—
‘I was running,’ he pushed out.
Running, she repeated to herself and at last took notice of what he was wearing, resentful blue eyes shifting from her feet to his. His running shoes were old and scuffed. Grey cotton jogging bottoms covered his long, powerful legs, with telling sweat marks darkening the fabric in certain places, especially around the tightly packed bowl of his hips, where—
Mouth paper-dry, she dragged her gaze upwards. He was still panting a little from his run up the hill and she felt the full visual impact of his hard male torso trapped inside a damp grey T-shirt that clung so tightly it could pass for skin.
‘On the beach,’ he added, and she missed his new husky tone as her eyes clung to the moisture glossing his strong brown throat. Her tongue snaked out. There was a sudden tense movement of his muscular breastplate which dragged her eyes down to it.
‘I was on the way back to the villa when I saw you stumble ahead of me on the path—Stop looking at me like that, agape mou,’ he said abruptly. ‘It is dangerous …'
Startled, she flicked her eyes back to his. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even being sardonic. Every nerveend in her body grew stretched and tense. Tugging in a breath, she felt a flush of colour rush into her cheeks and wanted to drag her eyes away from him but she couldn’t because this warm, dark, very physical man was the whole reason she’d made the impulsive decision to walk out at this ridiculous time of the night! She had not been able to lie in that bed without thinking about him being there with her.
Dear God, she thought helplessly. What a confession to make.
‘I’ll go back …’ Jerking into movement, she sidestepped around him.
‘I will walk with you.’
‘I don’t want you to.’
‘It was not a request, yineka mou,’ he said coolly. ‘I am not your wife!’ she flicked out. ‘What are you, then?’
The heck if she knew, Louisa thought angrily. Not his wife, not free and single.
Pinning her lips together, she refused to answer and just took off down the slope, walking quickly—carelessly—because she needed to get as far away from him as she could before she did something really stupid and told him what was—
The hand closing around one of her wrists pulled her to an abrupt standstill. ‘Don’t be more foolish than you have been already,’ Andreas said harshly. ‘This path is treacherous.'
Panicked—spooked beyond any sight of reason because she knew what was going
